There may be a case however where a beam long enough to be used across two spans is uneconomical for construction. In this case, we may want to connect two beams together, but not use a moment connection at their splice for economy reasons. So we’ll just use a simple shear connection, which we treat as an internal hinge. If we add one at 40 ft away from the left of the beam, it is near the inflection point of the beam, and so our shear and moment diagrams barely change, but we see a large increase in deflection, and the curve is no longer smooth since the beam can rotate freely at that point.
